Arabian Renaissance

It is one of the great ironies of history that Arab culture precipitated the European Renaissance. Now it is western culture that is precipitating an Arab renaissance.
The Abbasid caliph Ma’mūn was a student of ancient Greek philosophy, especially mathematics and medicine. Sometime around the mid-ninth century he read that the ancients had calculated the earth’s circumference to be 24,000 miles. He ordered scholars from his court to check it out. They went to the center of the widest flat plain they could find and measured the angle of the North Star above the horizon. Using a system of pegs and string they marched due north measuring the distance as they went until the star rose one degree. They had gone 66 2/3 miles. They went back to the starting point and reversed the process, going south until the star fell one degree. Again they had traveled 66 2/3 miles. They reasoned that the circumference must be 66 2/3 miles per degree times 360 degrees: 24,000 miles. Ma’mūn then sent his scholars to another site to repeat the experiment. Same result. Only then was the caliph satisfied that the Greeks had been right. They were close. The true polar circumference is 23,964 miles
The old Arabs were using what we now know as the scientific method, the rigorous system of observation, hypothesis, and experiment that wouldn’t emerge in Europe for another seven centuries. It’s easy to forget how much we owe the Arabs. It’s no accident we use their numbering system and not even the Greeks understood the concept of zero. The term algebra is derived from the name of the Arab who introduced it to us. Arabs taught us how to use checks to pay our bills. That word too is derived from Arabic. A Moorish philosopher named Avicenna is considered the founder of modern medicine.
By Ma’mūn’s day most of the works of Aristotle, Plato, Hippocrates, Euclid and the other Greek philosophers had been lost to the West. The library at Alexandria had been destroyed centuries earlier and Christian emperors had ordered the Greek schools in Athens shut. But students had taken their treasures to Persia, beyond the reach of Christianity. Arabs found them there and under the patronage of Ma’mūn and others widely translated them into Arabic. That sort of scholarship died out among most Arabs with the rise of religious Madrasas beginning in the eleventh century but it continued to thrive in Andalusia right up until Ferdinand and Isabella drove the last Moors out. By then much of the work had been translated from Arabic back to Latin and was widely available in the great universities of the Renaissance.
Arab descent into their own version of the dark ages began a thousand years ago and they are only now beginning to emerge from them. It is another testament to the dangers of confusing faith, science, and enlightened self-interest. A good part of the descent and a factor in the emergence can be traced to an abysmal attitude towards women. It is often said that a major predictor of one’s lifetime intellectual achievement is the educational level of one’s mother. Arab women are being educated today in numbers never before seen and they are beginning to think for themselves. No wonder so many Arabs see western influence as a threat to their culture. Traditionally illiterate and submissive women are beginning to ask serious questions and all hell is breaking loose. I believe that more than any other single factor it is their women who will drag these people kicking and screaming into the modern era.